


No Way Out This Time

by TheSigyn



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 08:33:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16446425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn
Summary: This story was part of a game on the Elysian Fields website. Disconnected chapter from a disconnected story.





	No Way Out This Time

The Ghanoa demon’s deli knife suddenly rang through the air, missing them by inches. It lodged itself in a bag of basmati rice, scattering grains across the floor. With a final burst of speed, Spike dragged Buffy towards the store’s bakery counter, then vaulted over the cake display case. Frosted cats and pumpkins seemed to mock him as he peered through the glass at the oncoming hoard.

The hoard crashed and tinkled as it settled down through the crack in the ceiling, like a pile of winnings from a slot machine. Buffy looked up through the hole to see the portal high above her. It was amazing that Spike had gotten to her and Dawn at all before the opening portal had started letting in the dragon’s hoard.

“I’ll never get up there,” Buffy said. “We can’t stop this.”

“Yeah, well, not your fault the tower crumpled,” Spike said. “Just be glad you survived the collapse. Now come on! We gotta get out of here. If this damn gold doesn’t bury us, the dragon will eat you alive!”

“Where’s Dawn?”

“I don’t know.” Spike leaned his head against the deli counter and took stock. “I saw you both fall through the roof. I thought she’d be with you.” This was scary. He was broken, bones grating as he tried to move. He’d only barely escaped the crack in the ground that had weakened the corner of the tower. Glory was defeated, but the hellgate was still opening. The others didn’t seem to be anywhere, and they were surrounded by a world slowly morphing into literal pandemonium. “Where’s the others?” he asked. “Watcher boy, the witches? Did you see while you were up there?”

“They were on the other side of the rift,” Buffy said. “I don’t know. Is it the whole world transforming, or just this section? And I don’t know where Dawn....” She looked around and her face crumpled as she pointed at the accumulating hoard. “What if she got caught under that?”  

There was nothing whatsoever they could do if Dawn had somehow gotten under that. Ancient armor, tons of gold, broken skeletons. Now Spike knew where the renaissance reenactors had come from. They were from Glory’s very own hell world, and they hadn’t wanted her back. He could tell from the armor in the hoard.

“I did this,” Buffy panted. “Demons, dragons, monsters, hell itself. I did this. I brought it on the world!”

“Yeah, well. It happens,” Spike muttered.

“Was this my destiny?” Buffy demanded of him. “I was meant to defend the earth, not destroy it.”

“Then we’re on the wrong sides again,” Spike said. “So what else is new?” He lifted his arm and deflected another thrown knife from yet another relocated demon. Another lightning bolt of hell energy hit the side of the wall, and the grocery store’s window flickered and melted into a bubbling fountain of muck, from which small, slimy creatures waddled out on three legs.

And there through the distant layers of hell-smog, Spike heard a noise. It was a tiny bumblebee hum of a scream, but he recognized it. “That way!” he shouted.

“What?”

“Dawn!” he said. He picked up the spilling basmati rice sack and hurled it at the nearest demon. “I can hear her screaming, come on now!”

The tripped out past the bubbling fountain, and had to kick the demon-creatures off their legs as they attacked with very sharp teeth. Spike’s boots were strong enough to resist them, but Buffy’s leather pants were too thin. She had to knock them off with the troll hammer. “I should have been faster. I should have done something....”

“Like what?” Spike asked. “Thrown the niblet into the pit?”

“Or thrown myself,” Buffy snapped. “Now we’ve got hell on earth.”

“Sounds like a good place to retire,” Spike said.  “There!” He was sore. His bones were broken from the fall, but he’d found the niblet. She was being dragged from the parking lot by what looked like a shadow with wings.

“Dawn!”

“Buffy!” Dawn shrieked.

Spike doubled over in pain as Buffy pursued Dawn and destroyed whatever alien-headed demon had her by her new stylish dress. When she came back Dawn was crying and bleeding, but otherwise whole.

Spike looked up. There was Giles, and Xander and his bird, and the two witches. So much for them being on the other side of the rift.

This was it. The whole world was turning to a demonic realm.

“My kind of world,” Spike said before he passed out.  

   

***

 

Hell actually wasn’t so bad, once you got used to it, at least not as far as Spike was concerned. But he wasn’t one to be particularly wounded by random death.

The Scooby gang and as many humans as figured out what was going on all huddled together, and eventually took refuge in a cave. They’d create foraging parties and go out looking for food or water. Most of the humans wouldn’t eat demon meat unless it looked sort of bestial. Spike and Buffy were reduced to hunters most of the time, tracking demons with paws, killing, skinning them, and removing any venom sacs, and then hoping the damn thing wasn’t poisonous. Spike knew several of the humanoid demons weren’t, but humans were bloody squeamish.

So it was sort of fun for a few days. Hunting with Buffy, taking the piss out of squeamish humans, lots of demon blood to gorge on. But then people started to die. At first it was just the humans, and that was okay by Spike, though it bothered him a little how wounded Buffy was by it. Then it got worse.  

Giles was the first of the Scoobies to perish. It wasn’t surprising. He wasn’t actually as strong a magic user as either Willow or Tara, and he was much older and less fit than Xander. He was still recovering from the wound he’d gotten before the hellgate opened, though he tried to hide it. He kept insisting he could manage foraging teams just as well as Willow or Buffy, but it wasn’t to be. One day his team just didn’t come back. Spike and Buffy left Willow on guard at the cave and went out to look for them. They found only a scene of carnage without even any body parts larger than an arm.

Willow was next. It should have been Tara, but Willow sacrificed herself to protect her lover, spending too much of her magic in an attempt to shield her and the foraging party. The resulting backlash shorted her out, and she died of an aneurism or something, blood streaming from her nose and ears. A noble act in its way, but ultimately fruitless, as Tara, already weak from the demonic energy coursing through the land and still not fully recovered from her brain-suck, went into a bleak depression and stopped eating. The demon meat had never agreed with her anyway, as attuned to the nature of Earth has she had been. Dawn took it upon herself to care for her, but there was a limit to what she could do. The young witch wasted away and finally didn’t wake up one morning.

Xander was the next Scooby casualty. He lost an arm in a demon attack, and gained a fever. He soon went the way of Tara.

Anya left then. They believed she’d summoned D’Hoffryn to take her back to Arashmaharr, but they had no proof. All they knew was that she’d up and abandoned them.

One by one the humans they were protecting and caring for were slowly picked off or dropped by hell-borne illness, until only Dawn, Buffy and Spike were left, picking the meat off the smoking bones of a demon in the mouth of a stinking cave.

“Well, at least we can eat the humanoid ones now,” Spike said over the sulfuric fire. He was trying to look at the bright side of having lost their last hanger on, but apparently the others didn’t see it that way.

“This is terrible. You should have let me die,” Dawn said. “You should have let me jump.”

“I couldn’t do that,” Buffy said. “I couldn’t.”

“Yeah, but what good is it to live like this?” Dawn snapped. “We’ve lost all our friends, and everyone else we were trying to keep alive. All of them! So much death, and for  _what?_  Just  _me?_ ”

“I wasn’t going to let you die!” Buffy snapped.

“This is my fault,” Dawn whimpered. “It’s all my fault.”

“It’s not your fault,” Spike said. “It was them dumb monks, right? Buffy couldn’t let you die any more than I can get this chip out of my head. Stupid spell she was under, wasn’t it? Monks made you more important to her than the whole bloody world.”

“They did not,” Buffy said.

Spike raised his eyebrows. “Didn’t they?”

“No!” Buffy insisted. “It was just  _wrong!_  I couldn’t let Dawn die because it was  _wrong,_  she’s an innocent, don’t you see?”

Dawn and Spike looked at each other over the fire, and then looked away, leaving the truth to rest. It wasn’t worth the argument.

“Stop with your stupid We Know Best and Buffy’s Wrong club!” she snapped, and strode deeper into the cave, fists clenched.

Dawn looked down. “ _This_  was wrong,” she said. “The crusaders were right. I should have been killed.”

Spike chucked another piece of brimstone onto the fire. “I’ll go talk to her.”

“It’s not like we can do anything about it now!”

Spike moved through the shadows to where Buffy stalked at the back of the cave.

“‘s really not your fault, love,” he said. “Any more than it was the little bit’s.”

Buffy was silent for a long moment. “Yes it was,” she said.

“Buffy–”

“You were right,” she said. She turned to look at him. “I was ready to die. I wanted to die. I saw Dawn was ready to jump and I was so....” Her eyes closed.

“Buffy?”

“I was jealous, okay? I wanted to be her. I wanted to be her so badly. To know that all I had to do was die and the world would be saved! I was thinking, trying to come up with some reason why I could jump instead of her. But then the tower collapsed, and....” She swallowed.

“And the world wasn’t saved in time,” Spike said.

Buffy looked down.

“Look. Doesn’t make it your fault. So it’s done. So, there’s no way out of this. So… that’s it, then. That’s where we are.”

“I don’t want to accept that….”

“Nah. You’re not good at accepting that kind of thing.”

“I couldn’t just let her jump....” Buffy said. “Not without....” She sniffed and leaned her head back. “I should have just jumped with her.”

Spike stared at her. “Why didn’t you?”

She looked at him.

“Why do you never?” He moved toward her. “What happened? Why do you never just take the leap?”

She looked up. “What do you mean?”

Spike stepped toward her. “It’s over,” he said. “It’s all over. There’s no one left to judge you, no one around to care. What have you got to lose now?” He growled low in his throat. “Bloody hell, what have I got to lose?” He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her towards him, moving in for a kiss.

“Get off!” she snapped, shoving him away. “This isn’t the time or place!”

“Does that mean there will be one?” he asked.

Buffy rolled her eyes.

Spike sighed and leaned himself against the cave wall. He looked immensely tired. “I know I’m evil,” he said. “But I’m glad you didn’t jump. I’m glad you and the niblet are still okay.” He shook his head. “I know what that makes me. It makes me the absolute last person in any universe you’d ever....” He swallowed. “But I can’t help it. Any more than you can help wanting to keep her alive.” He gestured with his chin at the silhouette of Dawn in the mouth of the cave. “So, yeah. I’d trade the whole bloody universe just to keep you. I’d trade my world if I thought it might keep you breathing.”

It was mad. It was over. There was absolutely no way out of this. And suddenly he was right. It didn’t matter at all.

Buffy stared at Spike. “Yeah,” she said. “That does make you evil.” And then to his utter shock she darted forward and kissed him. It was warm and passionate and slow, and it made his heart feel like it was beating again. “You’re wonderful,” she whispered against his lips, then kissed him again, briefly, sweetly. “But I’ll never admit it.”


End file.
